First Street Teochew Fish Soup

First Street Teochew Fish Soup is a hawker stall in a corner coffee shop at 1014 Upper Serangoon Road, near Kovan. It does one thing well: Teochew-style fish soup, with thick slices of fresh fish in a clear, lightly sweet broth.

William Lim started the business in the 1980s at First Centre, then moved it to Upper Serangoon. Today the stall is largely run by his two sons, Desmond and Aaron. BreadTalk Group later invested in the brand, but this coffee shop stall is still its home.

What to order

The menu is short. You pick your fish and a size, then decide whether to add a bowl of rice on the side or have mee sua (thin wheat noodles) cooked into the soup. Both cost a little extra.

• Batang fish soup: firm slices of Spanish mackerel
• Red garoupa fish soup: one of the two premium fish, with soft, delicate flesh
• Pomfret fish soup: silver pomfret, the other premium choice
• Seafood or mixed soup: the lowest-priced bowl, with prawns, fish cake and mackerel slices among other things

You can add extras such as minced pork, bitter gourd, fish cake, fish maw or fish roe. The broth gets its savoury depth from dried sole fish, with ginger and spring onion.

Why people queue

Freshness is the draw. The team buys fish at the market each day and starts slicing well before dawn. Reviewers often note that the soup tastes clean, with no fishy smell.

The stall opens only from morning until mid-afternoon, so plan it as breakfast or lunch rather than supper. Expect a line at lunch, when waits can stretch past half an hour. Come in the morning, well before the lunch rush, for a shorter wait.

The setting

The stall sits in a no-frills coffee shop, or kopitiam, at the junction of Upper Serangoon Road and Jalan Rengkam. Tables are shared with the other stalls, and the room fills up fast around lunch. Some tables are close to the road and can catch the rain in a heavy shower.

If you are new to this kind of place, our guide to what a kopitiam is explains how Singapore coffee shops work. Our tips on how to order at hawker stalls cover the basics of paying and finding a seat.

Getting there

Kovan MRT station, on the North East Line, is about an 11-minute walk away, according to Eatbook. Hougang MRT station is a short bus ride from the stall.

Nearby

For more places to eat in this part of the city, see our list of restaurants in Serangoon and Punggol. For a second hawker meal, Chomp Chomp Food Centre in Serangoon Gardens is another local favourite. You can also browse more hawker favourites and seafood restaurants across Singapore.